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Thursday, February 11, 2016

I have been unusually slow in terms of up-dating this blog. It's not for lack of content to write about. The CMA is embarrassing itself currently on the issue of conscientious objection and assisted dying, behaving like a true trade union would, without much concern for patient access to such services that its members will likely be monopoly providers of. The reason why I have not been able to actually blog about this is that I am swamped with publication deadlines. Editorials for both Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics had to be written, I was also briefly a Visiting Professor at St George's this January where I managed to catch up with colleagues like Cheryl Cox and Matthew Wynia, and I had to travel to Belgium as part of consultancy work I did for MSF/Doctors without Borders in 2015. - I have been travelling way too much. I also gave talks during events organised in November by the FDA/CDC and NIH in Bethesda as well as one organised a week or two later by the German National Ethics Council and the country's national science academy in Berlin. Then there were various paper deadlines, one of which I met, the other is one that I am working frantically toward meeting. One of these papers is on conscientious objection, and I have finally managed to submit it for consideration to guest editors of a bioethics journal, then there is a response I need to write to someone who responded to an Editorial I had in Bioethics(ya, a reply to a reply, very academic), as well as another article I need to produce on the issue of catastrophically ill patients' moral entitlement to access unregistered medical interventions. I have written about this before, but this paper will add new arguments to what I have said in the past on this topic. Yes well, then there are departmental obligations. I must produce our departmental newsletter, and I'm looking forward to doing just that. I'm also busy preparing for a bunch of lectures that I'm giving in various countries during the next few months.

The long and short of it is that I didn't have time to blog as frequently as I would have liked to. I'll try to do better.